The Fall
by MontyTheDog
Summary: A bad cover turns worse. Kensi and Deeks find themselves fighting for control of what's become their normal and trying to salvage their relationship after a hellish assignment threatens to tear apart what they have. AU-ish
1. Chapter 1

A/n MAJOR warning for substance abuse. Leave a review if this is something you would be interested in reading.

* * *

He's falling. And it feels like absolute shit.

His body doesn't want to move, but if he doesn't chuck up some of this sludge in his system, he's going to pass out. And that won't do. Even though his brain is on another level, his soul spazzed and everything in his line of sight fuzzy, all he can think about is Kensi. Because if this is him, sixty or so pounds heavier than she is, then she could be dead.

So he throws up for a good five minutes straight, slams his head against the toilet seat, and chews a handful of Tylenol. He doesn't know what the logic was in the medicine. It's not going to help him, or her for that matter.

He looks at her when he returns to their bedroom, and her eyes are cloudy. She's shaking like Sam did when he was electrified. "Stop. Stop it. Stop it. Stop." Her pupils move back and forth, rapid, dilated, paranoid.

He stumbles onto the bed. He grabs her. Doesn't know how forcefully. Can't feel much of anything. He says, "Baby," because for some reason that he can't recall at the moment, he's not supposed to use her name.

"Make it stop. Marty, I told them." She starts to vomit, then. Her mouth's full of the shit. He hoists her over his shoulder and heads for the bathroom, angling her over the toilet, holding her hair back.

She's shaking again. Probably ODing. She's probably dying. He says, "Shhh."

He carries her back to the bed when she's done heaving, and he listens to her talk nonsense for a long time, but all of his strength went into making sure she didn't choke to death. Now, he can't move. Coming down, coming down's like being in a coma after falling off of a cliff. He feels like he has the flu, like he's been hit by a semi, like a corpse. He can't imagine how she feels, considering they pressured her to take another hit after she was already gone, way gone. When she stills next to him, entering a state much like his, he numbly inches his hand across the mattress, finding her fingers. He looks over at her, and her eyes are glazed over, muddy, half open. Her mouth is parted. She looks dead. Maybe she is.

He pulls his eyes away from her and looks at the ceiling. He isn't conscious enough to be considered awake, but sleep is still so, so far away. He watches the light shift in the room, the angles of the shadows changing their positions, and wonders how long he's been lying there. Minutes. Hours. Weeks.

The edge of it all passes. He finds himself able to move enough to check and see if she has a pulse. She doesn't even look at him when his fingers find her throat, but the heartbeat threading under his hand is there. She moans as he wraps his arms around her.

"You're all right," he lies. He kisses her head. "You're gonna be fine, baby."

"I can't -" And then she remembers, and she drops her voice, so low he has to press his ear against her lips to hear. "I can't do this anymore."

He tightens his hold on her, trying to remember what she looked like before the op. Three months ago, her face had been fuller, the skin on her arms hadn't been covered in scabs and bruises from countless punctures, her complexion hadn't been the underlying color of granite, and when he held her hand, it was warm. It breaks his heart into a million pieces, looking at her. "I know."

"We need out."

"Rent a car. Ditch it a few blocks from the boat shed. I'll tell the guys you left me, pretend like I'm gonna track you down or something."

She grabs at his bicep, the one that encircles her waste. "You, too."

He traces the track marks on her arm, the red and the purple, the faded pink. "This can't be for nothing." He looks into her dulled, sad eyes. "I can't leave. We're so close. You go. Let me finish this."

"No." The prospect of one more day of this, for her, is absolute hell. She slumps against him. She can't leave him, not again. Not with the monsters they're trying to persecute. "No."

He sits up a little, but she still doesn't feel like she can move. He continues drawing little infinities up and down her forearm, up and down. Their symbol for forever and ever. "I need to tell you something, when we take a shower." That's code. When they need to discuss something, and the water's rushing out of the shower head, and they're flush against each other as the water splatters against them, they know they're safe to be Kensi and Deeks, not Mariah and Max. If they whisper, that is.

He guides her up, steadying her as she sways against his side. He half carries her to the bathroom, then helps her undress, holding her upright against him as they step into the shower. She's so weak. He kisses her head, holds her close to his chest.

"We're going to be out by the end of the week," he tells her.

She shakes her head. "How?"

"Don't worry about how, Kens. Not yet." She doesn't push. The Kensi that he fell in love with would've. He knows he's played a part in breaking her down, and he hates himself for it. "I need you to look at me."

She complies. She hasn't counteracted his requests for three months, because Mariah would never say no to him. Mariah knows what would come. And so Kensi plays the role of Mariah, Max's loyal, submissive, timid girlfriend. She does what he and the guys tell her to do, rather it be serving them food or shooting up next to Max.

When she looks at him, he barely sees his partner. She's so damn skinny, and her eyes are empty. She only looks about half alive. "Can you make it one more week, Kensi?"

She shudders, and he tightens his hold on her waist. "I need to know."

"I have to."

"No, that's not what I asked. Can you. Can you make it?"

"I will." She wraps her arms around his neck, presses her lips against his. He lifts her up, presses her against the glass door, kisses her neck. "I will."

* * *

"The cops, man. Fuckers out in full force. I'm telling you."

"You sure, Max? You sure you aren't being jumpy?"

"No. That's the word. My people, they've heard it everywhere. The fucking narks know when it's going down."

Olinger takes a long drag of his cigarette, double taps it, clenches his jaw. The bastard does that a lot. He's probably got TMJ. "Fucking narks," he says, finishing off his cigarette and rubbing the end on the bricks of his club before dropping it to the ground. Olinger isn't exactly the type of guy to kill himself looking for a trashcan or an ashtray for his buds.

It's dangerous, what Deeks is doing. But the shipment of drugs they're waiting for isn't scheduled for a little over a month, and he knows Kensi won't make it. If he's honest with himself, he doesn't think he can, either. Playing a misogynistic drug addict is bad enough when he doesn't have the most important person in his world to look out for.

"How the hell did they know?" Olinger's a gaunt-faced thirty something with scabbed skin and protruding cheek bones. He's skinny but tall as hell, and the combination of his blank eyes and fixed jaw make him seem taller, bigger. Truly a chilling mother fucker.

"Eye in the sky? They're everywhere, Tom."

"Could've been Big Brother," Olinger agrees, looking out over the marina. "Could've been some dumb ass with a big mouth." There's a beat of silence that passes between them, and then Thomas Olinger's eyes move from the water to look Deeks dead in the eye. "Could've been a fed."

Deeks doesn't miss a beat. "What do you mean? In our operation?"

"I don't know. I really don't fucking know anymore." Deeks tries hard not to react, but Tom really is a scary bastard when he wants to be, and his hard eyes, the color of steel, are staring right at him. The man hasn't blinked once. "I'll move it up. We'll get this shit done by Saturday. And you're going to fix the leak, aren't you?"

"Absolutely." All of a sudden, an awful wave of foreboding washes over Deeks. Under the terrible gaze of Olinger, Deeks feels trapped. It takes everything he has not to try and run, to find Kensi and hide her away until everybody's forgotten they exist. But he knows in that instant that there's no escape for either of them.

The feeling's gone as soon as it comes. Tom grabs his shoulder, pushes him toward the warehouse. "Call Mariah. I'll call Ang. Don't want them to feel left out."

"We hitting it tonight?"

"Until we can't. Or until Mariah can't. You treat her like a kid."

"She's impulsive. Shoots up five times in a row, freaks out, wonders why." Deeks doesn't remind him that the only reason she does that is because they make her. He thinks it gets Olinger off, watching Kensi spiral like she does. But one of the good things, about the only good thing, of Kensi's character being so resigned means he gets to be possessive. Because of Max's obsession with Mariah (and not because Olinger has a wife of his own), Tom hasn't touched her.

"It's a good thing she's a hot piece of ass."

"Watch it, Tommy."

"Oh, and her charming personality, of course." Deeks laughs, but Tom's eyes only slightly soften at his "joke". He never laughs.

Deeks reaches for his phone, wishing that Kensi would screen his call, but he knows that she would never, not when she doesn't know what situation he's in. She answers on the second ring, saying, "Max?"

"Hey baby. Wanna meet us at the shop?"

She sounds chipper, probably in case his phone's bugged or he has her on speaker phone, but he knows it's the last thing she wants to do. "Sure! Let me just finish, uh, picking up-"

Deeks rolls his eyes. "That can wait. Get down here."

"You miss me?"

"Always," he says, for real. Always and forever, that's Kensi and Deeks, not Max and Mariah. "Bye, babe." He makes kissy noises into the phone for show before disconnecting the call. "She's worried about cleaning the damn house," he explains to Tom, shaking his head.

"She doesn't seem very bright," Tom says, knowing that Max wouldn't take serious offense. "That's good. She doesn't ask a lot of questions, does she?" It's only half a question.

"She gets her hits, she gets her head, she stays happy. And quiet."

Tom nods. "Angela took some breaking in. But now I've got her right where I want her. She'd kill herself if I told her to. I might have to, if she keeps fucking up the meatloaf." Deeks can't tell if he's kidding, but Olinger isn't much of a joker. He swallows down bile that he feels rising in the back of his throat. "You gonna marry Mariah?"

"Why? So she can get fat and I can spend a few thousand on a ring?"

"So she knows that she's yours," Olinger explains. The way he regards marriage as a business transaction over a piece of property is fucked up, to say the least. "Mariah's a very beautiful girl."

"She loves me."

"If she loves anything, it's the drugs, the money. Love's a fucking joke." He lights up another cigarette. "Come on. We gotta get together the bouncers for tonight. We're going to be packed." His shoulders are stiff when he reaches for the doorknob of the side entrance that they're standing next to. "Thank God Kojo's covering tonight. I'm ready for another hit."

Deeks's shaking hands tell him that he's ready for another hit, too.

* * *

He's reclined in the back room with Kensi against his side, watching the strobe lights change color. The heroin isn't too bad.

Kensi's hair's all did up, with curls falling around her face. Her dress has hiked up mid-thigh, and he rests his hand against the green hem, rubbing his thumb in mindless circles. The heroin makes him feel like he's floating a foot above the couch.

He smells his girlfriend's hair and says, "Sunshine." She seems okay. It's just heroin tonight. Deeks doesn't mind it. He really doesn't.

Meth is a nasty, addictive drug. It makes him dig at his own skin until he bleeds, scratching at imaginary bugs. Kensi tripped out one time and had herself convinced she was on a field full of mines, and she kept blowing herself up. That was maybe the worst.

Then again, that one cocaine trip was awful, where she kept screaming and screaming for her dad. He had to hold her until she lost her voice. She never told him exactly what happened, but it definitely messed with her. He tried to stay away from coke.

But after a line of heroin, the shitty mission doesn't seem too shitty at all. Everything's beautiful, euphoric in a way that can only be contributed to the drugs. He could go for some more, honestly. Kensi probably could, too.

Kensi's smile swims in front of him. She reaches out, traces his lips with her fingertips, like she's blind. He only feels a little nauseous this time, and Kensi's scent is making it better.

Through the haze, he sees Tom and Angela. Angela's blonde and pretty in a simple way that a man like Olinger probably doesn't appreciate. Kensi's exoticism is no doubt more enthralling to Tom, but Angela's too passive to be jealous. Olinger's broken her down so that it's hard for her to feel much of anything.

But even Angela seems to be feeling the almost soothing effects of the heroin. It's impossible not to feel good. Deeks's smile falls away as Kensi's does, which is when Tom has his guys roll in a line of coke. "Speedballs, for the ladies!" he says over the loud music.

Deeks gives her thigh a gentle squeeze. "Go, Mariah."

They cheer her on, make her take another, and then, five minutes later, he holds her hips and guides her to do another line again. He can tell she's trying really hard to keep it together, but with cocaine, it's impossible. Pretty soon he's holding her down, trying to make sure that she doesn't hurt herself. In his altered state, everything's harder, and stopping himself from saying her real name is a struggle.

Olinger has an awful twinkle in his eyes as he watches her lose herself. "She's nice and fucked up. You're gonna have fun with her."

He knows his place is bugged from top to bottom, he's scanned it every week since they started. He tried to cover the ones in the bedroom with clothes and whatnot, but he had to keep it inconspicuous. Meaning that Olinger is probably looking forward to whatever he thinks is coming later. When she's this messed up, he hates it, even if she reciprocates his advances.

Right now, she's pressing against her forehead. There's a fierceness in her eyes that reminds him of when she walks into a firefight at work, but there's _something else_. Something that isn't Kensi, something that isn't normal. He'd call it rage, but that's not it, either.

Deeks as Max laughs at her reaction, when all he really wants to do is cower. He finds the word he's looking for, as he watches her face contort into a pained expression. Possessed.

"Oh, shit. Here she goes. Better get her home before she rips somebody apart."

Doped up, Olinger doesn't bother to hide his desire as he watches Kensi grip the table, her eyes dark and damp. "You do that."

"Come on, Crazy." He grabs her by the waist, and she lets him lead her out of the back of the club. It isn't until they're halfway home that he realizes her nails have been digging into the same spot for the majority of the walk, and now there's blood making its way down her arm. "Stop," he tells her, trying to focus. The drugs are making everything blur together, though.

"What? Stop what?" Her eyes shoot back and forth, paranoia and tension drawing her shoulders back.

He doesn't know. He remembers later, when her nails are drawing blood from his back. Her breath's ragged, and he'd be concerned about her having a stroke or something if it isn't for the fact that he's completely unaware of what's going on. Everything's a buzzing haze, and angels are singing somewhere in the back of his mind.

They crash, as they always do, and he reminds her. "End of the week." Then he reminds himself, saying, "End of the week."


	2. Chapter 2

He still has the ring he never got around to proposing with. Before the mission, they'd been approaching their second anniversary as a couple, looking at houses, talking about families. He became an NCIS agent a while ago, back when LAPD investigated him and questioned every decision he'd made undercover, every perilous choice they forced him to live with. After he'd been proven as innocent as he could be, he denounced the precinct for a permanent spot with coworkers that appreciated him more than his former employers ever had or would.

The shipments of cocaine to local bases that happened over the course of three months were smuggled in unfathomable quantities. Every other day a marine was overdosing, or doing something that resulted in a similarly devastating fate under the influence of coke. Something had to be done. That something had to involve cracking the infrastructure, bringing down Camazotz's IT. Deep cover seemed to be the answer.

Deeks had experience, and Max had a record. It wasn't rocket science.

But Kensi refused. She wouldn't have him surrounded by killers and addicts without her there to protect him, all for an undetermined amount of time. He tried to talk her out of asking to go with him, but she's stubborn as hell, always has been. That was the only time he hated her for it, though.

They make it through the remaining four days, somehow. He manages to alert OSP of the date change, and he starts to fantasize about returning to the home that he and Kensi had begun to create before they were thrown into this life. Olinger wants them to meet at the club before Max rides with him to the deal. He holds Kensi's hand on the ride, feeling nervous energy and hope flutter between them.

In retrospect, he was naive to think that everything would end like it was suppose to, with a raid and arrests and a few celebratory drinks. He immediately feels on edge when he walks into the vacant club. He nearly jumps when Olinger approaches them from out of a shadow, and the urge to run is all consuming. He tightens his grasp on Kensi's hand.

She moves closer to his side, and he knows that she feels it, too. He says, "We headed out?"

Olinger's shadow towers over the rest in the poorly lit club. Deeks senses that there are more people than just the three of them. "I've been unreasonably suspicious, Max. I got people too, and the more I ask around, the worse it gets."

"The meet -"

"There is no meet, Max. I called it off. I've been real paranoid."

Deeks tries not to react. "Why didn't you call me?"

"The feds knew before we changed the date. They know about this one, too." Either word's breached from NCIS to other agencies with moles, or the bastard truly does have people everywhere, because he knows about the set up. Which means he knows that somebody had to have told the feds the change of agenda almost as soon as it happened. "Now how is that? I didn't tell anybody but you, Max. Not until today. I had my people coming to me, saying that the narks thought the meet was today, still thinking it was next month. And then I figured it out. It was you."

"You're fucking losing your shit, man -"

"Shut up," he says, his voice unsettlingly calm. Men that Deeks recognizes emerge from all the places he knew they were hiding. Olinger laughs out loud when Kensi brings two men to their knees as they try to grab her, and now Deeks sees why he never smiles. The laugh sounded like a crow's squawk, and the smile twisted his face, cut across his features in a harrowing, grotesque way. "I'll be damned," he says, as he watches her fight.

Deeks doesn't have time to reach for the knife he has sheathed in the waistband of his pants. He's being shoved against the wall, and their fists keep connecting with his abdomen, and he finds himself gasping for breath. Kensi's been forced in a similar fashion to the ground, and she's writhing in pain, curling around the origin of the hurt, trying to protect her ribs from anymore blows. They're dragged to cemented bar stools, forced to the ground, ziptied around the metal bases. The men that took them down, five of them, stand behind Olinger as he approaches where they're restrained. Surprisingly, and to Deeks's chagrin, he hardly looks at Deeks, opting to kneel next to Kensi. He stares at her, fascinated. Deeks feels a growl building in his throat when Tom starts to finger a piece of her hair, and she tries to crane her head away from him when he runs his thumb down her cheek.

"You're a great actress," he tells her. "Max had me fooled, but you..."

"Would you fuck off?" Deeks is torn between wanting to laugh and telling her to shut up. Olinger isn't the guy to piss off in this situation, but Kensi's obviously over letting people do want they want to her.

Deeks can see the corner of one of his steely eyes sparkling with amusement, but he knows him well enough to recognize the anger slowly overtaking his demeanor. He doesn't stop tracing her cheekbone when he asks, "What did you say?"

"Fuck. Off."

Deeks can't do anything but watch when Olinger pulls his arm back and punches her hard, his fist connecting under her eye. Kensi's face falls to the side, her hair shielding Deeks from seeing if she's unconscious or not. "You stupid son of a bitch -"

"Save it," Olinger says as he stands, eyes still fixated on Kensi's face. She lifts up her head (he has no idea how she wasn't knocked out), and he sees a nasty split starting to swell under her eye with a bruise already forming around it. "You don't put your bitch in her place. Or are you guys even a couple?"

Olinger watches as he seethes in anger, fighting against his restraints. "Who the fuck am I kidding? You got it, bad. I'm starting to see that you're really the little bitch of the relationship. I bet you let her drive you around. I bet you cry when she fucks you..."

He knows that Olinger's just trying to get a reaction, but he's not overly concerned about defending his masculinity to a man with such demented views. He saves his strength for something else, and it clearly pisses Tom off when he doesn't get the response he was expecting.

Kensi's slowly coming to. Her words slur when she says, "You wish you were half of the man he is."

"Go ahead and defend him. It's not like he can defend himself."

Deeks sighs. He just wants to go home. "Can we stop comparing dick size? What do you want, Tom?"

"For starters, your names."

"Missy fucking Elliott." She's insane. Deeks snorts out a laugh.

"She's funny," he tells Deeks. "I hope she's still laughing when I rip her apart."

"If you touch her, I will destroy you."

"You don't scare me," Kensi informs Olinger. After months of no badassery, of no control, Kensi seems to think she's indestructible. Either that, or she just can't do it anymore. Whichever way, he wishes she would stop. He knows that Olinger's going to stop playing soon enough, and he's going to hurt her worse if she keeps this up. He doesn't deal with aggressive women very well at all.

"She's stupid, though," he tells Deeks. "I think you know what I've did to dumb bitches like her. I think you know how bad I'm about to fuck her up. And I think that I scare the living shit out of you."

He isn't wrong. Deeks knows what this man's capable of. He doesn't want Kensi to be subjected to any of it.

He struggles against the zipties. They're sharp, and ridiculously pliable for what they are. He has to figure out how to break free. He has to get her away from him.

Without warning, Olinger grabs her hair and pulls down in one fluid jerk. She cries out-she's always hated having her hair pulled. "Who do you work for?"

Neither of them say anything. He jerks the handful of her hair into the pole of the stool behind her, pulling her head forward before slamming it against the metal, and then he does it again. "Somebody better start talking. She's already getting a little distressed. She's not going to last as long as I hoped."

"DEA," Deeks tells him, wishing that he would stop hurting Kensi and come and beat on him for a little while.

"The feds know everything about me."

"If you kill us, you're going to get six years in the box. And then, you're only company's going to be nasty rapists that'll love little pissants like you. You wanna talk about a little bitch..."

"You don't get it. You're not going to win. I'm going to make you watch me slowly kill your girlfriend, and then I'll kill you, if you want. If you don't think you can live with what I'm about to do to her."

"Don't listen to him," Kensi says, and even though her tone is ever defiant, she can't completely conceal the fear in her eyes. It makes his heart hurt.

"If you let her go, I'll tell you anything you want. I swear. Hurting her's just going to piss off the DEA. I'm barely an agent, really. They probably won't even look for me."

"Love's such a pain in the ass, isn't it? I told you it was a fucking joke. I mean, look at you two. It's ridiculous." He stands up, and as if commanded, three men come to stand by his side. He cuts her restraints, but before she can do anything, she's being held down again, this time by awful brutes of men.

"No," he says, his hands forming fists behind the pole. "Get away from her."

"It's okay." He hates that she's trying to console him, when she's the one that's about to have God know's what happen to her. The men replace her old zipties for new ones, securing them around her wrists. "It's... it's okay."

He watches as reality sinks in. Her eyes fill with fear, and Olinger begins. He tries everything to get out of the damn zipties. He doesn't stop fighting, and neither does Kensi. Somehow the men force her to her knees. One of them kicks her side, and she falls face first, unable to use her palms to stop her. Her resilience is fading with every kick. A steel toe to the head, and she's obviously becoming disoriented. She rolls over, and he sees that her forehead's bleeding, and her zip tied hands are attempting to grab her side.

"Stop." He can't stand it. "STOP!"

She looks over at him, and he can see tears shimmering in her eyes. He tugs at the pole, feeling the chair slightly shift, but it isn't going anywhere. He feels for the screws, and starts picking at the ones in the back, testing to see if any are loose. He has an idea of what's coming, and he knows that it will destroy them, both. She told him what happened in Afghanistan one night, even though he insisted that she didn't have to _ever_ talk about it, but he thinks she figured she owed him an explanation as to why she woke up in the middle of the night shaking more often then not, especially on the nights they had sex and fell asleep before cleaning up. She admitted to him that waking up from a nightmare in a dark room with that feeling made her think she was back in the cave. When she told him, it made him physically ill. He'd turned whiter than a ghost and didn't know if he should touch her or not. In the end, she curled against him, and he swore to her that he would never let somebody hurt her like that again.

He may lie, but he'd be damned before he broke a promise he made to Kensi. Olinger completely ignores him, enthralled by the woman below him. "I need a line," he says, already bouncing at the prospect. Three of his men hold Kensi down painfully, and the other two lay out a line for him. Deeks can tell it's cocaine by the white dusting on his nose after he's done and the immediate insanity that fills his eyes. He charges over to Kensi, and Deeks can hear her whimper as he picks her up. Under the influence of the coke, even though she fights like hell, it's nothing for Olinger to restrain her.

He's taking her to the back, probably to one of the abandoned privacy rooms, or one of the many never used office spaces. "Kensi!" he screams, knowing that their names don't matter anymore. "Kensi!"

"He's going to break her," one of the men tell him matter-of-factly, before he and one of the other guys follow them to the back.

His fingers have started to bleed from picking at screws. He tugs the chair with all of his might, and he feels his left arm slip out of socket. It takes everything in him not to cry out, but with the combination of the now lose nails, the chair swayed when he dislocated his limb. It encourages him, and he continues his work, until he knows the pads of his fingers are decimated. He tugs one more time, unable to completely suppress a groan when his arm protests, and the chair topples to the ground. He slides his wrists down the bottom of the pole where it separated from its base and makes quick work of becoming unconnected from the pole. The men that didn't go with Olinger to play sentry approach him, but he thrusts his hips forward and breaks through the ties, and he knows that nothing can stop him from getting to Kensi.

He takes one guy down and uses that man's gun to kill the other two, sprinting towards the last place he saw Kensi. He peers down a hallway, finding the remaining men discussing whether they should investigate the sound of the gunshots, interrupt Olinger, or continue keeping guard. Deeks uses their moments of hesitation to his advantage, using the wall for cover as he leans out just enough to shoot one of the men. The other immediately reaches for the door handle, presumably to stop Olinger, but Deeks doesn't miss when he fires his gun.

He races towards the door the men had been standing in front of, kicking the bodies out of the way. He hears quiet pleas that sound nothing like Kensi and something that sounds like ripping fabric, and he barrels through the door. Kensi's shirt is torn open, revealing a purple and black midsection. She's cradling her wrist, and blood's dripping down her face, which is swollen from earlier and only getting worse. When she sees him, his name is a breathless cry. "Deeks."

He wants to take her up in his arms, but he wants to kill Olinger equally as much. The man doesn't seem to understand what's going on, but he does let out a furious cry when he sees Deeks. "Get away from her," Deeks seethes, his arm shooting pain as he reaches for the knife in his waistband. He aims the gun in his other hand, but Olinger launches at him, preventing him from shooting the remaining bullets in the clip and sending the gun sprawling across the floor. He's fighting like a viscous animal, clawing and biting and trying to tear out chunks of him. It catches Deeks off guard, but he remembers the knife.

Before he can use it, a man bleeding profusely from his hip bursts through the door. "I'm going to do it, boss," he tells Tom as he approaches Kensi, whose head injuries are making her disoriented and unable to put up much of a fight. Olinger is currently digging his nails into Deeks's neck, trying to carve out his jugular with his bare hands. He hears Kensi cry for him, but he just can't get the crazy bastard off of him.

He can see the man that he remembers shooting produce a vial of some blue tinted liquid. He buries it into just under her collarbone, and her body starts to shake as she screams. "What did you...do to her?" he chokes out. Seeing Kensi in so much pain drives him to the point of madness. He starts fighting like Tom, kneeing him in the groin, punching him right in the nose. He manages to use his knife, and he brings it up into his gut. Before he can twist it, his injured goon pulls him off of Deeks, looking pale and in a haze but determined enough.

"We gotta go, man." Before Deeks can get up, he kicks the air out of him. "She's paying for your mistakes now, asshole." He kicks Deeks again when the agent attempts to fight him. Deeks tries to breathe, but between his injuries and her unending, agony-filled screams, it's hard. "Listen to her." The smile on his face makes Deeks want to kill him a million times over.

The man leads Olinger out, and Deeks almost immediately forces himself to his feet to prevent them from locking the door, but it's already dead bolted from the outside. He knows that the cavalry will come eventually, he just has no idea how long it'll take them to thoroughly examine the club. Probably longer than Kensi has.

He bounds his way back to where she lie, her eyes wide and her cheeks covered in tears as she screams. He takes her in his good arm, terrified, and she grabs at him. "It... make it stop... please, Marty, make it stop..."

Whatever was in the vial obviously wasn't a street narcotic or amphetamine. Her reaction, he's never seen anything like it, never _heard_ anything like it. One memory comes close, though, when he was called to the site of a burning building. A woman that the firefighters couldn't get to could be heard screaming from outside as her skin melted off of her. The sound haunted Deeks to this day, and now Kensi's producing a cry that's similar. Maybe from a similar sensation.

"You gotta hang in there, Kens."

She sobs as she grasps at his arm, his broken arm, but the only pain Deeks feels is in his heart. "I can't. Please... Make it... End it." Her words are interrupted by broken screams. Her body starts seizing, probably from an overdose on whatever they put inside of her, and he holds her body through the tremors, praying that she makes it through.

There's blood in her vomit when she throws up. He holds her hair back, listening to her voice go hoarse as she yells in agony. "Marty, please." Her eyes are pleading and desperate. He's never been able to deny her anything. He reaches for his knife.

His hands start to shake, but even though she's begging for it, he doesn't want her to expect it. "S'okay, Kensi. It's all going to be all right." He brings the blade to her neck and starts to cry. "I've got you."

That's when he hears it, over the sound of his racing heart and her constant cries. He lets the knife fall from his hand. "We're here!" he says as he tries to get up, but Kensi's hand curling into his shirt stops him, so he just waits.

Sam and Callen have to pry her away from him. Callen screams for a medic. "What's wrong with her?"

"They shot her up with something... I don't know what." He realizes he's still crying. Everything's suddenly too much. Her swollen face, his dangling arm, the entirety of the mission, the death she almost faced, the amount of pain she's in.

He must look like shit, because Callen and Sam take a minute to notice him, despite Kensi being in much worse condition. They're holding Kensi, trying to assess her, but G reaches out to pat his leg. "It's over now, man."

Deeks looks blindly past him, feeling the weight of the world on his shoulders, pressing him down, making it hard to breathe. Medics storm in, and they take Kensi away. He tries to follow her, because she's still crying and his name's falling from her lips and he doesn't want to leave her alone, but Sam and Callen each grab an arm when he stands to follow. The pain shooting down his left one makes him groan, and he feels his head swim as his vision shifts. They notice the uncharacteristic disfigured lump in his arm and lead him to the ambulance. He looks around when they make it outside, says her name, and they promise she's in good hands.

"What happened?" Callen asks, looking at Deeks's bleeding fingers and broken arm. Deeks doesn't answer. He can't talk about it yet. Any of it.

They take him to the hospital; he refuses to ride in an ambulance. The doctors inject him with enough morphine for his arm to only distantly ache when they set it into place and give him a sling to wear. They tell him his ribs are bruised and wrap his hands for him after applying balm, and they encourage him to rest. But the only thing he says is her name.

He's been in the hospital for forty-five minutes, and he hasn't thought about anything but her, and how screwed up the case had been. Sam and Callen enter his room, both looking rattled, and he immediately asks, "Is she okay?"

"It was a designer drug. The CIA used hallucinogens during the cold war, under the code name MKULTRA. What was injected into her seemed to be a play on one of those."

He still hears her voice, begging him to do something to make the pain stop. He shudders, knowing that he's going to have nightmares replaying that scene every night into the distant future. Sam continues when Callen stops, saying, "The thing is, this drug is so new, the doctors don't know how to handle it. Any type of medication could have unforeseen adverse effects. For the time being, she's been given something to make her sleep. We don't know how she's going to react to it yet, but she was in too much pain to be conscious." Deeks doesn't miss the cringe on the man's face as he recalls the condition Kensi was in.

"She's sleeping?"

"Yeah." Callen waits a beat before saying what they're all thinking. "Thank God."

Deeks sits up, adjusts his arm, and bites his lip to hold back a groan as his ribs emit a wave of pain that the doctors had tried to suppress with medication. And the medicine probably would have continued to work, had he not sat up with a renowned sense of mission.

"You're not going to her. You need to rest."

"I have to be with her." He promised her a long time ago that even if she didn't see him, he'd be there. He intends to see it through. And that bastard Olinger's still out there...

He shoots up, and the guys have to steady him to keep him from passing out. "Take it easy."

"He's still out there," Deeks tells them, trying to make them understand. "He's still out there... I have to be with her... Please."

The mention of Olinger on the loose seems to shake them into action, and they help him into the hallway, then down to her room. The whiteness of the hospital washes out her face, making her look like a bloodied ghost, every mark amplified by the lights. He feels sick to his stomach, seeing her like this, but at the same time he's happier by her side. He stands as a sentinel next to her, forgetting for a few moments that Callen and Sam are in the room with them. "She's going to be okay," Sam assures him, laying a hand on his shoulder.

"She always is," Deeks says, but his reply is distant. He feels so drained, he can hardly even think.

"We'll give you a minute. We won't be far."

Deeks turns his head slightly, but decides against turning to face them. He doesn't want to move anymore than he has to. "Find him," he tells the guys, and he can see the concern in their postures in his peripheral vision. They leave without saying anything else.


End file.
